Finding a public bathroom in major cities and on transit gets harder and harder.

[Firelock76]

Hey Overmod, where did your grandfather go shad fishing?  I'm curious.

Oh, and the Southern thing to do with catfish, at least in some places, is to put them in fresh water tanks for a few days to get the muddy taste out.

[Overmod]

Firelock76

Hey Overmod, where did your grandfather go shad fishing?  I'm curious.

Rivers in NE Pennsylvania; I regret that these were stories told when I was very small and I did not think to ask before shad became "illegal" in the early Seventies.  It is not at all difficult to bone shad if you know the trick which is turning the fillet knife a particular way to get the extra sets of bones to slide out without detaching from the spine.  But I have forgotten exactly how that was done, just as I can't remember how to re-coil one of those expanding landing nets.

My father told stories of fishing the Shohola gorge, which is a fairly long way from Kingston, so the actual range of rivers might be larger than expected.

[CandOforprogress2]

Had fried Shad Roe at a Diner in Richmond VA....Disgusting when you think about it.-"Shad is an American saltwater fish, a type of herring that spawns in fresh water at the start of spring. The American shad, a boney fish that is typically three to five pounds each, is prized not for its flesh but for its eggs, a delicacy known as shad roe."

 

[Firelock76]

Interesting.  This was before my time, but my grandfather used to fish from Alpine Landing on the Hudson River and would catch shad during the yearly runs.  Most of the time, though, he'd come home with stripers or what was locally known as "tommycod."

According to my father, they were all good to eat!

[Overmod]

Both the North and South Rivers we're famous for shad, and I think remained so right up to the time we had to be saved from ourselves.  I am still bitter that my plan to revive the famous New Jersey caviar industry repeatedly failed (now until the effects of remediating dredging have settled down, probably not in my lifetime, followed by the PCB/dioxin free sturgeon growing to proper size...).  Hard to believe south Jersey supplied most of the connoisseurs of Europe in the late 19th Century!

 

[Firelock76]

Overmod, and everyone else for that matter, you may find this interesting.

http://www.njpalisades.org/timesTides.html

It's a brief overview of the shad fishery on the Hudson, late in the game though.

Grandpa didn't fish like that though, he just used a pole and a line!

Shad also migrate up a number of rivers on the East Coast, the James and Appomattox here in Virginia for example.

In fact, in April of 1865 when Sheridan punched through George Pickett's line and broke the Petersburg stalemate ol' George was away from the front attending a shad bake!  Lee was furious at Pickett for being away from his post and relieved him of command of his division, although Pickett's immediate CO General Longstreet said Sheridan's force was so powerful there was nothing Pickett could have done to stop it, even if he was there on the front line.

I hope for Pickett's sake that shad was tasty!

[Overmod]

Distinct clones of shad lived in many of the major and minor rivers in the East.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Analysis-of-American-shad-population-structure-using-the-Bayesian-clustering-algorithm_fig2_261512046

tells some very interesting stories about how well-meant attempts to stock stressed or overfished rivers may have caused irreparable genetic change.

 

[Metro Red Line]

PRO TIP: Hotels have the best, cleanest (they get cleaned a few times a day) public restrooms you will find. There will be many in the lobby or ballroom/conference room levels of the hotel.

[CandOforprogress2]

Hotels in downtowns yes..found that to be the case in Indy IN. Shhh just dont tell anyone.

 

[phkmn2000]

I live in Chicago and over time you get to know what's where, but I do sympathize with visitors. Metra has rest rooms in most cars, though they don't provide water for hand wash. CTA trains and buses have no facilities, but they stop every couple of blocks. The new parks have been built with facilities, though not always pristine as they are heavily used (Chicago gets 50 million visitors annually). But the city itself provides nothing except associated with government offices, and many of those are secure. This stuff gets cut when expenditures exceed revenues, an increasing issue with cities everywhere.

[Leo_Ames]

Firelock76

This was back in 1991 or 1992 or so, certainly before 1994 when the NS steam program was cancelled.

The consist wasn't made up of Amtrak cars, but vintage N&W cars belonging to NS and various NRHS chapters.  All original, no holding tanks. 

Possibly had the steam program lasted past 1994 the cars might have been retro-fit with holding tanks, but to my knowledge at the time none had them.

I just pulled out the August 1993 issue of Trains which had a nice article about Norfolk Southern's rebuild program for the excursion fleet that had just been completed, curious about this.

Not a mention of holding tanks anywhere. 

[Firelock76]

No, the cars never got holding tanks, but they may have been in the long-term plans for the excursion fleet.  As a matter of fact, the steam excusion crew at NS were just as blindsided by the shut down as anyone else, one project they were involved in at the time was the conversion of a baggage car into an updated state of the art head-end power car, then BOOM!   Orders came to shut the whole thing down.

Shocked everybody here in Virginia, let me tell you!  The local paper here, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, even front-paged the story.  Lady Firestorm saw it first and let out such a gasp that I thought somebody died!